Leslie Jamison got married, had a baby, got divorced – then wrote a book about it all

The American memoirist hailed as this generation’s Joan Didion has written about her struggles with alcoholism and anorexia. Now she’s putting the messy breakdown of her marriage on the page. She talks to Helen Brown about single parenthood and whether we’re all guilty of gaslighting our children

Jamison writes about the breakdown of her marriage in ‘Splinters' (Grace Ann Leadbeater)

Call Leslie Jamison a narcissist and she’ll shrug. “It’s a word that often gets thrown against memoirists like me,” says the New York Times bestselling author. “The rise of the memoir is often taken as a sign of our ‘narcissistic’ times.” These days, she jokes, every bad boyfriend is dismissed with the diagnosis. But, unfortunately, so is a woman who puts the intimate details of her personal life in the public domain: Jamison’s work has dived deeply into her struggles with anorexia and alcoholism. In her new memoir, Splinters, she unpacks her decision to leave her husband in 2019 when their baby was just 13 months old.

Snatching time for a video link interview between teaching classes at Columbia University, perky, perceptive Jamison tells me she’s keenly aware that a divorce memoir might come off as a writer’s attempt to turn her side of things “into some kind of official account”. But those familiar with the work of a woman widely hailed as the Joan Didion of her generation will know better than to expect narcissistic self-justification.

Jamison, 40, is relentlessly challenged – by friends, family, strangers and her own self-doubt – over her choices. Her choice to walk away from a difficult (but not violent) relationship and become a single parent. Her choice to keep working. Her choice to throw herself into a reckless new romance. And, of course, her choice to put the whole thing on the page.